Adam Sand breaks down why roofing ads fail: they don't stop the scroll. His three-step fix is reaction (define the action), target (pick your audience), and weapon (choose the creative). A cedar-roof infographic for high-income homeowners with HOA rules turned awareness into qualified leads.
Most roofing ads fail not because your service is bad, but because your ad doesn't stop the scroll. I'm Adam Sand CEO of the roofing business partner. In this video I'll break down how to create high performing ads and reveal a simple three step formula that turns attention into book jobs on Facebook, Google or even AI search.
The fundamental elements of successful advertising is one, you have to stop the scroll, you have to interrupt them from wherever they are. So if they Google roofers near me, there's the ads, there's Google lsa, there's the map pack, there's the top SEO search results. Like there's a lot of places for their eyes to scroll across the screen to try and solve their problem. Same thing with generative search and AI. That's the new frontier of online advertising is how do we optimize for generative AI search. But you have to stop their eyes from scrolling so you can get their attention and hold it long enough so that they watch or consume some piece of content. So that might be the copywriting in your Google Ad, that might be the hook in your TikTok video. That could be getting them to see the bold statement on your billboard or read the back of your postcard. Doesn't matter what the advertising is, it's just you have to get them to watch so that you become known to them. Now you won't always get them to convert here, you won't always get them to buy, but that Facebook ad is not going to convert. And that's really what they're saying is that most Facebook ad agencies are good at getting to step four, which is becoming known, but then they don't do anything with the audience that they've built. You have to then retarget that audience with an offer, a compelling offer, some incentive of opportunity, urgency or scarcity so you can get them to click on it and then convert. A lot of people say Facebook is good for this and it is. And they say but it's not good for this. It's that this is easy and this is hard. And so most can do easy, less can do hard. So it's not binary possible or not possible. It is what is easy to get and deliver on, what is difficult to accomplish. You need to know that the elements of successful advertising, wherever you run ads, whether it's Google, Billboard, whatever, is that you have to stop people from moving their eyes around, get their attention, get them to consume or watch something so that you become known. Easy to do. So you have three things that make a good Ad, the reaction you want, the target you're going after and the weapon you're going to use. So this is essentially how you set up a campaign, right? Because your campaign is your campaign objective. What is your objective? What is the reaction, the action you want them to take? Who do you want to take it and what are you going to put in front of them to get them to do it? So in Facebook language, the reaction could be awareness. You want eyeballs. The people you want to get eyeballs on your stuff is women, ages, you know, say 40 to 55, who like gardening, who have an interest in gardening. So, so why would you want women in this age who have an interest in gardening? Well, because maybe if you offer a catch all and you have a lot of documentation, pictures, videos about how the catch all protects really nice landscaping, well, then you now have something that would get their attention so that you would become known as a roofing company that protects the landscape. Your next level of ad is your convert ad. So then you say your reaction is you want them to convert. You want them to click a button that says get a quote. Your target could be people who live in this neighborhood of Wedgwood Heights. And the weapon could be an infographic about how to properly install cedar roofs. Because in my market, we had a neighborhood that was a higher end neighborhood for earnings. And all the roofs in here were mandated by the HOA that you had to have a cedar roof or a tile roof. And if you had a cedar roof, you probably didn't have the structure to put a tile roof on because it was so much heavier. So you pretty much had to put cedar back on your roof. And so there's a good way and a bad way to do cedar. And we had an explanation. An exploded view of a properly installed cedar roof. And this little sign says welcome to. So when they look at this infographic, they know it's for them.
